Last night, another wave of gaming companies pulled out of GDC next month, with Microsoft, CD Projekt Red and Unity joining a growing list. Now, Epic Games and the folks behind the widely used Unreal Engine are also cancelling their appearances.
The announcement was made by the official Unreal Engine Twitter account, which says that due to uncertainty around health concerns, Epic Games will no longer be attending the show:
Here at Epic we were excited about participating in GDC 2020. Regrettably, uncertainty around health concerns has made it unviable to send our employees, and so we have made the difficult decision to withdraw attendance.
Stay tuned for Epic news and more through other channels.
— Unreal Engine (@UnrealEngine) February 27, 2020
Epic Games was supposed to have a booth showing off some of the marquee Unreal Engine powered titles of the first half of 2020. That includes titles like Final Fantasy VII Remake and Minecraft Dungeons. Epic Games was also due to take part in a Q&A session about its store, which will now seemingly not take place.
Facebook/Oculus, Capcom, Square Enix, Sony, EA, Microsoft, CD Projekt and more have also pulled out of GDC. At this point in time, GDC 2020 is still supposed to be going ahead as planned but that could change given the increasing number of withdrawals.
KitGuru Says: This is an unfortunate situation all around, particularly since next-gen console hardware is just on the horizon. Plenty of developers would have been talking about the new tech and the possibilities that come with it.